Passion Favors the Bold Page 22

  “I will be packed in time to catch the evening stage,” she said.

  “And I will go with you,” said Benedict.

  It was done, then. She’d known from the beginning, she shouldn’t count on a scholar for love. If she gave him her heart, she’d get a hospital plan in return. For an embrace, an experiment; for a kiss, a treatise on vegetable acids.

  She’d wanted so badly to be loved that she’d fancied herself in love with him, despite her better judgment.

  So she was telling herself now. But the pain in her heart as she stood was more than a fancy.

  “I thought I could love you,” she said in a voice pitched for his ears alone.

  “Why?”

  He always asked why. He had to ask.

  “Because I was a fool who ignored the empirical evidence before me. My hypothesis was incorrect.”

  “I am sorry for it.”

  It wasn’t as though he hadn’t warned her. His heart was for people as a group, not for one person who could draw close to him. It was a good heart. It just wasn’t hers.

  Hoisted with her own petard.

  Sometimes she hated Shakespeare, too.

  * * *

  With Linton’s help, Georgette was soon packed. In fact, Linton was soon packed too.

  “I never wanted to be a bondager,” she explained as she placed the last of her possessions into a valise. “I only wanted honest work. I could find that in London, don’t you think, Mrs. Crowe?”

  “Georgette, please. Or Miss Frost, if you must.” Enough lies.

  “Yes, Miss Frost.” The woman looked hesitant. But they were almost of an age, were they not? They had simply lived their lives in different worlds. “Well, when we get to London, I thought I might do what you did here at Raeburn Hall.”

  Seduce a duke’s son? “Er—which thing?”

  “Help a doctor. I’m strong, and I’m never ill.”

  This made sense. “I’ll pay your way,” Georgette promised. “Since my brother is flush with cash and throwing it about.” Not that she meant to take a cent from him. She still had her own savings, thanks to Hugo’s generosity on the way north.

  Not that she was thinking about Hugo at the moment, either. “And the baby? How will you care for the baby, Miss Linton?”

  “Linton will do, miss. Or Harriet if you like.” On her lips trembled a hesitant smile. “If I’m known as a widow, and I could find a good job, then I could take care of the baby respectably.”

  “You should be a widow,” Georgette said, heartfelt. If she’d had a pistol in her hand right then, she wouldn’t have answered for Keeling’s life.

  The stage was not due to arrive in Bamburgh for hours, but Georgette fled Raeburn Hall rather than waiting to walk with Harriet and Benedict.

  The days were long this far north, and the sky held its blue tightly. It would still be daylight when they left Sir Frederic’s lands for good. It seemed the day would never end.

  Well. A lady’s twenty-first birthday ought to be momentous, ought it not?

  The air was cool and fresh, salt-scented as she wound closer to the beach along a familiar path. But she had not come to see the sand this time. She did not build with it; she did not look at the impressions her feet left behind.

  She had come to see the castle.

  It was stark and bright in the determined light of late afternoon. The stone of its outcrop burst gray and jagged from the lush green of grass and the sifting sands.

  She stripped off her gloves and dropped them, then picked her way over the rugged earth until she reached smooth lawn, then the curtain wall of the castle.

  This close to it, she could see the wear on the ancient building. The stone battlements that seemed freshly cut from a distance were worn by time—and possibly a Scotsman’s weapons. The turrets that had looked as smooth as Rapunzel’s tower were ordinary rock, rough at the seams.

  This close to it, she could see the color of the walls, too. The castle wasn’t all brown and gray, as she’d thought from a distance. It was those colors, yes, but it was also cream and rose and russet. It was golden, and some stones winked with tiny bits of shiny mineral. It was less perfect and more vivid than she had thought.

  And it was beautiful.

  After she had looked her fill, she retrieved her gloves and walked away. There was no need to look back.

  She made her way to the coaching inn in Bamburgh, arriving in plenty of time to buy tickets for the stage. Linton was waiting there already, a valise in each hand.

  Two lives packed within a pair of leather bags. It was good to be able to depart so easily, was it not? If one wasn’t going to stay, it might as well be easy to leave.

  She laid out the money for tickets: threepence ha’penny the mile. She counted out silver coins, reserving some for meals and lodging. Then she turned about, tickets in hand.

  “Benedict!” He had arrived while she was occupied with the tickets. “Where is your trunk?”

  “They’re holding it for me inside the inn,” her brother replied. “Will you walk with me before the coach comes?”

  “I suppose,” she granted reluctantly. They stepped onto the pavement, walking a smooth line before the tidy row of shops and homes that bordered the principal street. Benedict moved easily, guiding himself with thumps of his hickory cane. His strides were longer than Georgette’s.

  “You’ve changed,” she said. “You don’t seem bothered by your blindness.” When she’d last seen him, the loss of his sight was new. He had never been morose or bitter, but for a while he had been—to excuse the expression—at sea.

  “I used always to be leaving,” he explained. “But now I have somewhere to go.”

  “Where is that?”

  “Edinburgh, if the lady will have me. Though I’ve much business to conclude first. I won’t be a barnacle on her hull.”

  “Please tell me that is not a euphemism.”

  He laughed. “Call it a figure of speech.”

  “You said you had money, though. You found half the stolen sovereigns.”

  “Ah.” He halted, folding his hands neatly on the head of his cane. “I am afraid I was deceptive there. I do have money for you. And I was present when the stolen sovereigns were found. But the events are not connected.”

  “I don’t understand.” She, too, halted, shaded by the awning over the entrance to a milliner’s shop. “How are the events not connected?”

  “I went to Derbyshire thinking I had to have that gold to fund the life I wanted. But in the end, it was the easiest thing in the world to say someone else had found the trunks.”

  “Why?” Oh, lovely. She was taking after Hugo now.

  “What I thought I wanted changed. And how I thought I could get that life changed too.”

  “That is vague and unhelpful.” She looked about for something to kick.

  He smiled. “Brother’s prerogative. In short, my pride was less important, and allowing a space for someone else in my life was more so.”

  “How sentimental.”

  “You know me, always reading those old fairy stories. Oh, wait—no, that was you.” With a flourish, he held out an arm. “Shall we walk on, Mrs. Crowe?”

  “Please, don’t call me that. It was an idea of Hugo’s.” Or maybe it had been hers? She couldn’t remember now which of them had first offered a false name. Always a bird. She should have flown away when she had the chance, just as she’d told the little bird in Sir Frederic’s tapestry. “It wasn’t wise. But then, nothing to do with Lord Hugo Starling is wise.”

  “I rather thought the opposite,” Benedict said, falling into idle stride beside Georgette. With one hand, he held her elbow; the other used his cane to bring the world to echoing life around him. “But then, you have spent more time with him lately than I.”

  She didn’t want to talk about Hugo. “I already bought my ticket for the stage. And Linton’s—that is, Harriet’s, too. I don’t need any money from you. Especially since you didn’t claim the Royal Reward.
” Her brow knit. “Wait. Where did you get money, then?”

  “From the sale of our parents’ bookshop. I thought to use it for something else, but—it was a gamble that didn’t meet with success.” He smiled. It was a smile much like her own. “Or not with the sort of success I expected. So, the money from the sale is intact. And half of it’s yours.”

  “I don’t need you to give me guilt money, Benedict. I’ve never needed help from you before, and I don’t now.”

  “What is this arrogance? No one can get by without help. Hugo helped you all the way here, with his time and his money. I’m helping you now.”

  Brothers. “If you want me to push you in front of a carriage, you’re going about it the right way.”

  He laughed. “My reflexes are excellent. And when you say you won’t accept help, what you’re doing is denying every good thing someone else does for you.”

  She had not thought of it that way, that denying an offer of help could be a form of selfishness. Or that even worse was accepting help while insisting it was not wanted.

  Again and again, Hugo had tolerated that. Whatever it took to reach her destination, he helped her get it. How could she not have seen the sacrifice piled on sacrifice?

  Or was it a sacrifice, if it was what he wanted too? He had also wanted the gold for his hospital. For his perfect perfect hospital. And when she tried to help him in return, he told her to go away. For her own sake, he said. For her own good.

  This was the heart of it: to Georgette, help meant I love you, and she didn’t want it unless she knew it was real. To Hugo, though, it was a simple kindness. He’d made no gestures of devotion; he had only reciprocated. She took his hand; she kissed him first. She pulled him into the wardrobe.

  I love you. Do you love me in return?

  He didn’t. He was sorry for her, that was all. She had deluded herself, and that crushed her heart. But a heart was only one part of a body. And the rest of hers was fine.

  She should know by now that she could not rely on anyone else to give her what she wished for. A pity that one could not create love on one’s own. But one could create a home, and somehow she would.

  Somehow. She would. Somehow.

  “Let me not call it help.” Benedict broke into her thoughts. “Let me call it justice. What I wish to give you is not guilt money, and it is not aid. It is no more than what you deserve.”

  She narrowed her eyes.

  “You’re making some sort of strange face at me,” he said. “I can tell, because your fingers have gone all tight and clutchy on my arm. What is it?”

  “How is it justice?”

  “Ah!” He swung his cane in a jaunty swoop before striking it again on the pavement. “Because you are no less a child of our parents than I am. It is not fair that their every possession should have come to me, as a male and the eldest.”

  “But that—” She frowned.

  “That makes sense, doesn’t it? It made sense to me.”

  It did make sense, when he put the matter like that. How like their parents, to be careless of her even in death. “They didn’t want me. Mother and Father, I mean. I always knew it, and I tried to be as little bother as possible. But they didn’t want me.”

  “They didn’t,” Benedict agreed.

  She stumbled. Halted. The words were a gut punch, one for which she thought she’d been prepared for years. But some blows, there was no way to prepare for.

  Benedict reached out a hand, closing it on the cap of her shoulder. “I put that badly. I am sorry for that. They didn’t want me, either, Georgette. They didn’t want children at all, for children were a distraction from their own pursuits. There’s nothing wrong with either of us.”

  “And with them?”

  “I don’t know.” He looked up at the sky he could not see. “They did the best they could.”

  Georgette squared her shoulders. She patted Benedict’s hand where it rested. “No. I don’t think they did.”

  The elder Frosts would never have been warm and sentimental, but they could have made their children as welcome as customers. They could have valued them as members of the family as much as they valued help in the shop.

  Benedict squeezed her shoulder, taking comfort, then let his hand fall to his side. “That’s true. I’ve always thought of them from a child’s point of view. But thinking back as an adult, it’s clear that they weren’t very good parents, were they?”

  “Ah, well. You got away.”

  His smile was crooked. “I had to. You can’t imagine what it was like growing up among all those words and being unable to read them. At least, not as well as they thought I ought. If I tried harder, they were sure, the letters would stop swimming about and switching places before my eyes. If I really wanted to, I would appreciate the books as they did. But I couldn’t. By the time you were three years old, you read better than I, and I was twelve.”

  She had been so young then, she hardly remembered a time her brother had lived at home. She missed him as one missed an idea, no more real to her than the longed-for cottage or a castle from a storybook.

  Yet she’d seen a castle. And now, here was her brother.

  “Still, I should have stayed,” he said. “I shouldn’t have left you alone.”

  “I did all right. You’d have been less happy if you’d never gone to sea, and I would not have been more so.”

  She didn’t know if this was true, but he looked relieved.

  Probably it was true. There were as many ways to be all right as there were people in the world.

  She was all right when she remembered her parents. They had given her shelter and food and clothing; they had seen to her every bodily need.

  It had not been enough for a child as hungry for affection as she’d been. But she was a grown woman now, and she knew she would not starve from lack of love.

  “We turned out fine, didn’t we?” she decided. “Neither of us wanted to stay in the bookshop, but why should we? Our parents devoted their lives to an occupation they loved. We ought to do the same.”

  Benedict offered his arm again, and they turned back in the direction from which they’d come. “I intend to.”

  “As a sailor? I know you are miraculous, but the Royal Navy will surely not allow it.”

  “No. As a traveler, sometimes. And a writer.”

  “A writer,” she mused.

  “Do you doubt? I’m extremely witty. And I’ve a turn for an anecdote. Though most of them are not appropriate for sisters.”

  “Nonsense. Inappropriate anecdotes are the best sort.”

  “I cannot argue with that.”

  She hesitated. “Benedict, I’m afraid. I’m afraid if you give me money from the bookshop, I won’t see you again. Will you make sure that doesn’t happen?”

  He hauled her tightly against his side, pinning her in a quick hug. “You know I will. I’ll visit you wherever you are. And once I’m settled, I hope you’ll visit me, too.”

  “Don’t crush my bonnet! It’s my only one.” She struggled away, smiling. “And yes, I will visit you.”

  “What will you do now? I could travel south to London with you, or I could pursue my other errands. Shaking free of my various commissions, turning myself into a civilian.”

  “For your lady, to whom you do not want to be a barnacle? Go, do what you need to. Miss Linton and I will be fine traveling south.”

  “As a rumpled, vulgar boy?”

  She coughed. “I didn’t think you’d have heard about that.”

  “Hugo’s letter was informative. Here, you ought to have it in case you need to bribe your way into Willingham’s good graces.” He patted his pockets, drawing out a paper. “Is this it?”

  “That it is.” She recognized the tidy, slashing handwriting at once. “Thank you. And no, I will not travel as a boy. I’ll be Miss Frost, a respectable woman of moderate means. I don’t want to follow someone else’s dream anymore. I don’t want to fit myself into the corners of someone else’s life.”


  “Fair enough,” said Benedict. “That’s why I went to sea. London is big enough, surely, for you to find a corner of your own if you wish.”

  “I think so. I have learned that I like helping people. When I do, I matter to them—but better yet, they matter to me.” The coaching inn was drawing close; soon their walk would come to an end. “I’ll find a purpose somehow. I want one, you see. Having money isn’t enough to carry me through the rest of my life; there’s got to be a reason to get up each day. I have a whole week to think of one before I arrive in London.”

  “If Hugo could hear you, he would wilt at the notion of so little planning.”

  “Let him wilt.”

  “Please tell me that is not a euphemism.”

  She choked. The first laugh she’d had since toppling from a wardrobe with Hugo that morning. Ages ago. “I wish we knew each other better, Benedict.”

  As they halted before the coaching inn, he pulled her into another rough hug. “We will see that we do. How can I find you once you reach London?”

  She thought about it. “Write to me care of the Duchess of Willingham. After all, I am her guest. Hasn’t everyone said so?”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Locked in the parlor again.

  Damn. Double damn. Exponential damn.

  He’d thought to do so much good in this room, and now—there was too much furniture, and he was alone, and Georgette was gone, and nothing was any good.

  Which was no excuse to stew. Stewing turned one’s thoughts into mush. At the table set up for medical supplies, he unclasped the long leather case that had become his most dependable companion and extracted his hospital plans.

  He unrolled them flat on the table, bending over to peer at them closely. He didn’t have his spectacles on, but he knew how every line looked. He knew every change he had made too. Flipping the pages over, he looked at the list of dated notations. Here a window, there a wall.

  He hadn’t made any changes since arriving in Northumberland. Was that because everything was perfect?

  No. Nothing was ever perfect. Getting as close as could be, though—that had mattered to him. Just now, the heart had gone out of him. These precious plans were but ink and pencil on paper, rolled and unrolled so often that the paper had become soft as cloth.